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Metroid Dread review: Heroine in a hellscape

(Switch) **** Age: 15+

These near-invincible robots stalk you like a predator but are vulnerable to a special limited cannon blast Expand
Samus is agile and swift, with plenty of offensive weaponry, but she requires quick fingers to control Expand

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These near-invincible robots stalk you like a predator but are vulnerable to a special limited cannon blast

These near-invincible robots stalk you like a predator but are vulnerable to a special limited cannon blast

Samus is agile and swift, with plenty of offensive weaponry, but she requires quick fingers to control

Samus is agile and swift, with plenty of offensive weaponry, but she requires quick fingers to control

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These near-invincible robots stalk you like a predator but are vulnerable to a special limited cannon blast

Ronan Price Twitter Email

There’s never been another female gaming hero like Samus, star of the Metroid series. Her sex is irrelevant, half the players probably haven’t noticed she’s a woman and she’s the antithesis of flamboyant characters such as Lara Croft.

But Samus can mix it with the best of them, cutting a swathe through the throng of alien life forms that colonise a remote planet she’s sent to investigate. Plot isn’t a strong point in Dread. Samus remains as always the silent protagonist and her motivations derive from no more than instructions delivered by an anodyne AI to search and destroy. Instead, the gratification flows via her progression from underpowered explorer to tooled-up bad-ass.

The Metroid franchise is one of Nintendo’s renowned properties and yet 19 years have elapsed since Dread’s true forerunner, Metroid Fusion. This isn’t even the long-rumoured Metroid Prime 4 that seems lost in development hell.

But it would be misguided to consider Dread a stopgap simply because it reverts to a 2D side-scrolling format that harks to a different era in games. This instalment easily counts as the best Metroid in two decades, especially given the mixed reception afforded the other recent entries in the canon.

In keeping with the core principles that invented the whole metroidvania genre, Samus begins the game shorn of her powers and gradually recovers them, opening up inaccessible areas of the map as she does. Standing in her way is a menagerie of mildly dangerous creepy-crawlies, a handful of monstrous bosses and a pack of near-unkillable robots.

Dread leans into the unsettling atmosphere it establishes early on, its gloomy caves and corridors a warren of platforms leading you past dormant machinery, flickering lights, lava lakes and shuffling monsters. Every one of Samus’s steps is haunted by the prospect of an unexpected encounter with a floor-to-ceiling boss or the eerie chirrup that warns you’re being hunted by an invincible killer droid.

These tense, desperate fights for life almost compensate for the relatively mundane exploration that punctuates the remainder of the game. The labyrinthine map and the retreading of steps may be emblematic of a metroidvania but the shtick feels tired at times.

Dread also presents a hostile challenge to the less dextrous player, its controls a mass of inputs and its difficulty spikes a frustrating hurdle. Look past that and Dread manages to be mostly enthralling, especially for veteran fans.

But it certainly makes you wonder how Metroid Prime 4 will reinvent the formula that’s showing its age.

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